“I think John’s starting to get it now—I knew he would eventually; it just takes him a little longer than most people. Let me sum it up for you, Brad. John’s family fortune consists mostly of landholdings—thousands of acres in rural Virginia. That land has been in John’s family almost since Jamestown, or so the story goes—but the documents in that scrapbook show the story isn’t quite true. It seems the land didn’t belong to John’s family in the beginning—it was ceded to another family when Virginia first became an independent commonwealth in 1776. John’s family apparently didn’t like that—so, being the band of scoundrels and cutthroats they were, they stole the land—they murdered the people who legitimately owned it and claimed it for themselves. There was the problem of the land grants and deeds, of course, but they managed to work that out. They had a few lawyers in the family—wherever there are scoundrels, you find lawyers—and the lawyers had connections in the Virginia Land Office. You can guess what happened: The old deeds mysteriously vanished and new ones suddenly appeared.

“Of course, the other family wasn’t going to just roll over and let their land be taken away, so one of them decided to go complain to the governor, Patrick Henry—remember him? Only he never got to Patrick Henry. Somebody in John’s family ambushed him along the way— cracked him over the head with a barrel stave, according to his deathbed confession. See, that’s the endearing thing about John’s family: Whenever they do something immoral or illegal they always feel bad about it later.

“Now here comes the really fascinating part. Guess how John’s ancestor got rid of the body. That’s right—he got the clever idea to bury it in a graveyard, right on top of an existing grave. Who would ever think to look there?”

“The Patriot Center,” Brad said. “The two-hundred-year-old body.”

“That’s very clever of you, Brad. I don’t think my husband has made that connection yet, but then you always were a lot quicker on the draw. It’s the result of your good breeding, I think.”

“The Patriot Center,” Braden whispered.

“There, he got it—I think a little lightbulb just went on in his head somewhere. That’s right, John, the Patriot Center—and it wasn’t just the body at the Patriot Center. Check the copies again: There were lots of victims over the years, all from that same family—the original owners of this land. Apparently they passed down the dirty little secret of what the Bradens had done to them, and every generation or two someone in the family set out to prove it. But every time they got close, someone in the Braden family made sure it didn’t happen—and another body got buried in a double grave.”